The first epoch of The Croopier was a time specific game production project by Abelardo G. Fournier. It portrayed different issues highlighted by the news media industry as games published weekly in a web environment.

Among other issues, it exposed the treatment meted out by public authorities to the arrival of boats with undocumented immigrants as a recurrent and solution-less tetris; the Gaza conflict as a medieval witches’ Sabbath; and the regulated layoff of jobs as a problem of permanently unbalanced scales.

The micro-games archive of The Croopier is a playful and polymorphous way of observing contemporary global mediatization. More tellingly, it questions the ongoing transformation of world affairs into events ready for consumption and entertainment, a conversion deactivating both the information itself and the receiver’s power to act beyond the news.

Madrid, 2013

The transformation of the mass media news logic and power into a playable and expressive space.

The Croopier is conceived as an archive of 'game situations', that is, views of news and current issues of common interest, proposed from the hypothesis that the game perspective is constitutive of a major part of the contemporary experience of the world.

The Croopier was born in pursuit of exploring an hybrid area between journalism and media art. A systematized experimentation has been assumed for this purpose. Each week a new game is published at the project's site, accompanied by a textual commentary, references, links or images that insert it in its context. They define a sort of comic-strip-games, belonging probably to the 'newsgames' category proposed by Gonzalo Frasca and Ian Bogost. Their only restriction is that they must be fully developed in a two-day period of time. Their main objective: to achieve a proposal of a critical approach to a particular issue different from the ones that a news article or a comic strip may provide.